Shaun Low

I don’t know how many of you have heard the saying that blogging is 90% marketing and only 10% blogging, this article is going to cover many of the aspects involved in blog promotion, (marketing) and writing, (blogging).

Many bloggers become almost obsessed with with the aspect of their blog and tend to forget the other important factors that make a blog what it is. This can happen in a variety of ways including:

-Focusing too much attention on the website design. I know having a great design and website usability plays a major role in the success of your blog, but what is a great design without any content?

-Focusing too much time on writing content. This goes back to the old saying “If you build it they will come”. Sorry to say but this is far from the truth in the blogging world. You can write the most spectacular articles but if nobody is there to read it, there is no point in writing it in the first place.

-Focusing too much on the SEO work on a site. Many bloggers get so tied up in constructing the most perfectly optimized site they forget about connecting with other bloggers and interacting with their readers,  which comes at the expense of their site design and content.

-Spending too much time staring at your blogs statistics. Put in simple terms this process is called being a Stats Whore. Obsessivly staring at your blogs stats is a counter-productive activity that will get you nowhere.

Measuring Your Blog’s Ranking And Gaming The Various Systems

Bloggers who are trying to establish their presence in the internet world are always being measured by specific rankings and stats for their website. These numbers and rankings do provide a great deal of information but to what extent should bloggers become so concerned with these ranks that they almost have to “cheat” to improve their ranks? Gaming refers to the process of manipulating your rank for a certain ranking system. This can be accomplished in many ways.

-Technorati Rank

A blog’s technorati rank is based on the amount of inbound links coming from all other blogs. Technorati rank is one of the most popular and common ways of measuring a blog’s popularity or success. Technorati provides a good indication of how much progress a blog has seen compared to other blogs. Technorati ranks your blog only among other blogs and nothing else. Why is this good? Because you aren’t competing for a higher rank wither other websites only blogs.

Gaming Technorati: Technorati offers other ways of ranking blogs and one of them includes technorati’s infamous “Technorati’s Popular Blogs“. This list is the top 100 most favorited blogs in the world. The only way to get on the list is to have more technorati users favoriting your blog. Why would you want to be on this list?

-Fame

-More traffic

-Ego boost

Maki over at Dosh Dosh is the one responsible for creating the huge buzz of gaming technorati and getting on technorati’s list of most favorited blogs. Many bloggers think that his experiment of getting on the most favorited list diminishes the value of technorati and decreases the legitimacy of the list but as Maki points out his actions were completely justified and here is why:

-Technoarti is democratic: the users are 100% free to make the choices they made, they were not forced to add DosDosh to their favorites list but because of his authority in the internet world he was able to manipulate his readers into adding them to their favorites list. If you take away the democratic aspect of Technorati then the system is useless and will go down the drain.

-The favorites list was constructed to allow users to add their favorite blogs to the list and keep informed of any updates their “favorite” blogs have made. Another term for “Technorati’s Popular Blogs” could be “Technorati Bookmarks” or something along those lines. The list was made with the pure intention of bookmarking purposes so the users can track the information of the user’s most favorite blogs.

-The list is an “open playing field”. Everyone and anyone has the choice to create such scheme (including Maki’s colossal Technorati Favorites Exchange). I used the term “colossal” because this simple scheme put Dosh Dosh into the list with ease.

Because the technorati favorites list was constructed under the idea that all users were able to act under their own free will, I see nothing wrong with gaming technorati to increase your rank.

-Google Page Rank

A while back Google created it’s own ranking system which is called the Google Page Rank. According to Wikipedia:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Google page rank gives us a quick look at how the most authortive website in the world ranks other websites. Keep in mind the system is based on the combination of the quality and quantity of backlinks, (not just quantity). There is a small sense of democratic features included in the page rank system but what I like best about it is that all votes are not equal, therefor sites with more authority have a stronger vote.

Gaming Google: Google will rank your blog on a simple scale from 0-10, where 10 is the best rank and 0 is the lowest. There are a variety of ways you can increase your google page rank.

-Link trains or viral link exchanges: This is a system that involves a bunch of websites or blogs that create a system that intricately links each site involved in the link train with each other. This system greatly increases the amount of inbound links to your site. Google had no rules against these linking systems until just recently. You can check out full details of Google’s attempt to stomp out these link trains here.

-Reciprocal linking: This is one of the oldest and most traditional ways of increasing links to your site and improving your page rank. Linking to one site and having them link back to your site is the definition of reciprocal linking. Unfortunately this is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and this can damage your reputation with google.

Pros of Google Page rank:

-Simple way of determining the legitimacy of websites.

-The rank system is based on quality and quantity, (not quantity alone)

Cons of Google Page Rank:

-Going from a PR of 0-5 can happen very easily and over the course of a few months or less. Many blogs and websites have jumped 5 ranks or maybe more within one Google page rank update while many established and well-trusted websites can have a low page rank.

-The page rank is based on only backlinks and nothing more. The quality of content has nothing to do with page rank, only the number of inbound links pointing towards your site. I’m sure we all heard content is king and quality links will follow to your site if you write high quality content. This is only a theory and not always the case. There are thousands of blogs out there that write amazing content but because of the lack of links to their site their page rank and search engine rankings will be relatively low.

Gaming Goolge isn’t something you want to spend too much time doing. The all-mighty and famous John Chow has been banned from Google because he was encouraging a system of mass-reciprocal linking and look what happened, he got removed from Google’s search engine results

-Alexa Rank

Alexa compares the traffic levels of any site compared to all other websites in the world. Unlinke technorati, Alexa compares to all sorts of websites including: e-commerce, info, pornographic, search engines etc. So it becomes obvious that ranking well for Alexa is much harder than ranking well in technorati due to the increase in competition levels. According to Alexa:

Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews.

As you can see Alexa ranks websites based only on the information provided by the users who actively use the toolbar. The toolbar records search patterns only from information based only on the all of the users who use the toolbar. So the accuracy of Alexa is quite debatable and I wouldn’t recomend that anyone should worry too much about their Alexa rank.

Gaming Alexa: Alexa ranks a website on a huge scale from anywhere from 1-1,000,000 or even higher. 1 is the highest rank a website can get which is currently being held by Yahoo. Gaming alexa is a fairly simple thing to do, here are some easy techniques anyone can participate in to increase their rank.

-Install the Alexa Toolbar on your own computer and visit your site using the tool bar everyday. This is obvious but it works.

-Get friends to visit your site using the Alexa tool bar.

-Use an Alexa redirect on your website URL.

-Encourage visitors on your site to use the Alexa tool bar

-Social bookmarking websites like Digg and Stumble upon will greatly increase traffic to your site therefor greatly increase your alexa rank.

Regardless of how inaccurate Alexa rankings may be it is essential for some blogs to increase their Alexa rank by any means possible. Why? Because advertisers looking to purchase ad space on your site will use Alexa to see how much traffic you are getting. Sponsored review sites such as Pay Per Post and ReviewMe increase the amount of money a blog makes per sponsored post based on Alexa rank. There has been no recorded cases of anyone being banned or removed from Alexa’s ranking system so I see nothing wrong with gaming the system to increase your Alexa rank. Please keep in mind Alexa is highly inaccurate and increasing your Alexa rank should only be for purpose of making more money with your blog or website.

-Increasing your authority in the social bookmarking world

We are all familiar with Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious and any other social bookmarking tools in the internet world. These sites were built with the intention of being freely controlled and operated by the users and nothing more. Weather we like it or not these systems are always being “gamed” in the sense that the community isn’t always in control in determining which websites or blogs to deserve an increase of traffic to their sites purely based on the content found within the websites. There will always be an athoritive role in these communities and blogs and websites will always be manipulating their traffic levels to their site by exploiting these social communities.

Gaming the Social Bookmarking community: The idea is fairly simple, get more friends to vote for your site using the social bookmarking tools and you will get an increase of traffic. It’s not hard to build a network of friends who always digg or stumble each others stories. I admit I submit and vote for my own stories and do the same to all of my fellow bloggers in hopes they will return the favor to my site.

There are countless ways you can maximize the traffic from these social bookmarking sites and they can’t all be covered in this post but using these social networking sites to increase traffic, comments, and links to your site is essential for all successful blogs. These social tools were all created to be used freely by the users and manipulating these sites is fairly risky. As long as you follow all of the rules and guidelines that each of these sites set aside for the users to follow you shouldn’t get banned.

I recommend checking out these social bookmarking sites as a means of increasing traffic to your site. There is nothing wrong in manipulating your traffic using these websites as long as you don’t get yourself banned. Here are the top 10 social bookmarking sites you can use to increase traffic:

1.Digg

2. StumbleUpon

3. Netscape

4. Delicious

5. Reddit

5. Fark

6. Blink list

7. Furl

8. Magnolia

9. Simpy

10. Spurl

So lets take a step back and refer the first sentence I wrote on this article: “Blogging is 90% marketing and 10% blogging”.

Marketing your site refers to:

-Spreading the word about your website

-Increasing traffic

-Increasing backlinks

-Building relationships with your readers and other webmasters and bloggers

-Increasing your authority in the social bookmarking world

-Monetizing your site to increase profits and income

-Increasing your ranking in certain ranking systems, (Alexa, technorati, page rank etc)

-Spending time “Gaming” the ranking systems

-Working on the search engine optimization aspects of your site

-Working on website design to increase functionality, usability, and visually appearance

-Analyzing the statistics of your blog which can be used to maximize traffic

-Reading other websites and blogs to increase your knowledge of the industry

-Participating in link exchanges and viral link trains for traffic and increase search engine results

-Commenting on other blogs

-Responding to the comments on your blog

-Answering e-mails your readers send

-Learning how to write high quality content through experience and reading other blogs

Blogging refers to:

-Writing valuable content on your blog.

Conclusion:

It becomes apparent that blogging isn’t a simple process of mashing a bunch of posts together to get instant success. Unless you are a full time blogger time management becomes very important in your blogging career.

In the end it is ultimately the bloggers decision on how they wish to build their blog. If they want to participate in any viral link exchanges, technoati favorites swapping, or exploiting the social bookmarking community it is up to the blogger. This is what makes blogging so unique, there are endless ways you can build and establish your blog, if every blog was created the same way blogging wouldn’t be very interesting. Those who take the risk to manipulate their rankings and game the social bookmarking community will see an instant increase in traffic and authority, but as stated above, (John Chow getting banned from Google) there are risks involved. There is no right or wrong way to build your blog to the levels of which you desire, it is the choices you make along the way which determines how successful you are in the long run. If you find the perfect balance between blog promotion and blogging you will become very successful.

About The Author

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 12:09 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.